AROUND CITY HALL understood it, "murder is still a felony, even in New York") Since the city's politics are viewed by many out there as excessively liberal, it is a matter of some astonishment that the big victories the Republican National Committee is now bragging about include not only senate races in Georgia and Texas and gover- nors' races in Virginia and New Jersey but also, confounding the Democrats' theory that they should be seen as the party of the cities, the election of the mayor of the nation's second-largest city (in Los Angeles last June, Richard Riordan became the first Republican elected in thirty-six years) and, now, that of the mayor of its largest city. A Dinkins campaign commercial held Giuliani, a former United States Attor- ney under Reagan, responsible for many of the most unpopular policies of the Reagan and Bush Administrations, though many of them were policies he had had nothing to do with formulat- ing. "Can we afford to vote for someone who stands for everything we've fought against?" the Dinkins campaign asked local voters in the commercial's kicker. Better not to ask, perhaps. In a late- September visit to the city, Henry Cisneros, Clinton's Secretary of Hous- ing .and Urban Development, urged N ew Yorkers to reëlect Dinkins, because "the largest city in America cannot have a Republican mayor." He added, 'What sense would it make to have fought so hard to put a Democrat in the White House and then put a Republican in City Hall?" Not quite official figures for November 2nd show Giuliani to have won by fifty-three thousand votes out of a million eight hundred thousand cast, compared with the forty-seven thousand by which he had lost to Dinkins in 1989. On Election Day, polls in most of the local dailies reported that the may- oral race was too close to call. Until then, Dinkins had been slightly ahead, but some upward movement for the challenger turned it into a photo finish. Giuliani half jokingly (but who could say?) credited this development to Clinton's having worn a cap that said "Rudy" when he went jogging near the White House on the morning of Octo- ber 28th. Someone had sent the cap to the President as a promotional stunt for the movie of that name, about Rudy Ruettiger, an unlikely football hero who finally realized his dream of playing for Notre Dame. Later that day, Clinton flew to Qyeens for another Dinkins- boosting appearance. (Clinton may be from Arkansas, but he knows better than to refer to "the Qyeens," as George Bush did a few years back.) By the time the President arrived in New York, a Dinkins campaign operative had rustled up a cap for him promoting another movie-"Dave." On the morning after the election, Clinton called Dinkins to express regret for the disappointing out- come, despite all the hard work that had been put into the cause-by him, among others. There was some evidence that he took the result personally. He did not call to congratulate Giuliani un- til November 17th, while negotiations over the NAFfA treaty were going on; he had been reminded, perhaps, that he would have to work with Republicans as well as with Democrats Clinton told Giuliani that it would be a good start that they had a friend in common, Bobby Wagner-who had died two days before. Early in December, Giuliani had a forty-minute White House meeting with Clinton. By mid- December, he seemed to have become the President's new mayoral favorite, and was approvingly cited in Clinton appearances for his proposal that Ameri- cans who want to carry guns should be subject to federal licensing, extensive background checks, and training in the use of guns as is done in the case of automobiles. M ANY New Yorkers, among them those running both the Dinkins and the Giuliani campaigns, had con- cluded after the 1989 election that the Republican candIdate lost because he came across as a scary, law-and-order kind of character. The plan of his 1993 media consultant, David Garth (who has now run six of the last eight success- ful New York mayoral campaigns), was to present Giuliani as one of the nicest fellows a voter would ever want to meet, while the Dinkins forces naturally en- couraged voters to see him as scarier than ever. In the final days of the cam- paign, the Mayor himself kept boosting the impression that his opponent fa- vored puttIng as many people as possible in jailor, if he couldn't manage that, shooting them down. "I'm running for mayor, he's running for warden," 35 Dinkins kept repeating, and he hit an even more strident note by adding, "His idea of gun control is target practice." By 1 A.M. on Election Night, it be- came clear that the election was over, and the ugliness ended, at least for a few days. Unlike Governor Mario Cuomo and, to a degree, Clinton, Dinkins does not write his own speeches. When it came time to concede, he turned to his staff people in his Sheraton New York headquarters. "You got a concession speech?" he asked. They said they did. It had been written the day before by Eli Attie, a young Harvard graduate (he is now twenty-six) who joined the local government four years ago as a member of the city's Urban Fellowship program, and later signed on as a Dinkins speechwriter. The atmosphere at the Dinkins head- quarters had been optimistic, and Attie found it painful to put together words that might be needed if the worst should happen. On Election Night, Peter John- son, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer and an informal adviser to Dinkins, contributed to the speech a part urging the crowd to hold hands and pray together. He and Attie wanted to add some appropriate words that Johnson thought he remem- bered from St. Francis of Assisi, but in the rush they could not find them. Mterward, neither of them suggested that the speech was theirs, not the Mayor's. "It was the Mayor as he really is," Attie said. The Mayor read the speech in a strong voice, asking his supporters to stand with their next mayor as partners-a partnership that he said Giuliani had earned. 'We must reject the notion that what has hap- pened today is anything other than a fair and forthright call for change," he said. "You see, my friends, elections come and go, candidates come and go, mayors come and go, but the life of the city must endure." In the next few days, numerous local editorials praised the Mayor for what was seen as his emi- nently worthy ave atque vale to political life. The columnist Liz Smith joined the chorus for national readers. "People . . . are still talking about Mayor David Dinkins' graceful, forceful, stirring . h " h " I ' conceSSIon speec , s e wrote. t s too bad David couldn't have presented him- self like that throughout the cam- paign-not to mention his four years in ffi " o ceo .